Slough manufacturing history

 A child of the War Office. Slough was one of many Buckinghamshire villages drawn to ever expanding London. London needed vegetables and Slough grew them. London needed houses and Slough had been making bricks for centuries; Eton College was built with Slough bricks. Slough wanted to be linked to the rest of the country by rail, but the Provost of Eton complained that the boys under his charge might use it to get away.

The Great Western Railway did come, but with no station for Slough; the nearest was in the neighbouring village of Langley. Trains did however stop in Slough, at a make-shift station, and then ran on through Langley without stopping on their way into London. The railway did slowly attract manufacturers, Slough was given its own station and trains began to stop at Langley.

James Elliman was already in the town as a linen draper and was producing his famous embrocation. He prospered and provided the town with a fire station and recreation ground. In contrast Lovegrove's chair manufactory closed. Halley's mineral water plant, the Gotha iron works and Fulbrook's engineering works all set up. Of more enduring benefit to the town, Horlicks, created in Canada but which nourished our forces in both world wars, chose to manufacture in the town. Naylor Bros. Paints came to Slough and formed the basis of ICI's paint division famously producing Dulux.

In 1917, the War Office commissioned the construction of a Mechanical Transport Repair Depot on a 600 acre site on which work began in July 1918. The depot was to collect, repair and repurpose the many thousands of vehicles used by the army in the war. In the months that followed the armistice, work continued until a parliamentary committee produced a report with the recommendation that the entire site, vehicles and all, be sold.

The site was bought by a consortium of businessmen and it became owned by the Slough Trading Company. Surplus vehicles were sold and buildings completed. The first factories were let to Gillette, Johnson and Johnson and the Hygenic Ice Company; Citroen Cars followed. The infrastructure of what had now become Slough Estates Ltd was added to, and further tenants arrived. St Helens Cable and Rubber brought its workforce from Warrington. Three Scots entrepreneurs set up Bitumen Industries but of greater significance Forrester Mars set up a confectionary factory and also a plant for producing food for the nation's increasing number of pets. Crane Packing followed with an Art Deco building echoing the design of the Mars towers. Workers came to Slough from the depressed areas of the country but the town struggled to build enough housing and community facilities.

In the Second World War nearby Langley was home to Hawker Aircraft's production of Hurricane fighter planes. After the war, Langley Park became the headquarters of Radio and Allied (later GEC Radio and Television) then run by Michael Sobbell, father in law of Arnold Weinstock. Both would become part of GEC which later also had in Slough Satchwell Controls. Langley also attracted the Ford Motor Company to build its commercial vehicle plant where the first Ford Transit was made. In order to house this further growth in the population, a good number of prefabs were erected.

Was John Betjeman right when he wrote: 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough'? The poem is a critique of places like Slough where fields were replaced by factories and to the benefit of 'the man with the double chin' who became rich as a result. The report on the parliamentary debate on the siting of the Mechanical Transport Repair Depot quotes members as lamenting the loss of 600 acres of fine wheat land.

Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial estate in Europe under single ownership. It has some six hundred tenants from the UK and overseas countries including USA, Germany and South Korea. The estate receives electricity and heating from a dedicated power station fuel by refuse. Tenants now include Electrolux, GSK and Azko Nobel.

Further reading:

Judith Hunter, The Story of Slough (Newbury: Local Heritage Books, 1983)

Hitchin manufacturing history

Hitchin is a product of its soil which is a rich loam and so ideal for growing cereals but, even more so, herbs especially lavender. The undulating countryside also offers excellent pasture for sheep. A benign climate and adequate water supply completes the picture.

For centuries there had been water mills on the river Hiz with the business of grinding grain into flour. It was a good business with a regular market. The range of cereals grown attracted dealers looking not only for bread flour but for seeds yielding oil and cattle feed, and oats for malting for the London breweries. The arrival of the railways in the mid nineteenth century encouraged the building of a new corn exchange and dealers came from as far afield as Liverpool.

In the sixteenth century, lavender plants were brought from Italy, where they grow wild, and it was found that Hitchin's soil and climate were perfect for the plant. The flowers from the lavender plant are processed and distilled to produce fragrant lavender oil for use in toiletries. There were a number of firms in the town growing and processing lavender but the largest, Perks & Llewellen, caught my eye because Perks was my mother's family name. Perks & Llewellen were successful and supplied a growing market in the nineteenth century.

If lavender and a range of cereals could be grown, what else? The answer came from a young man who, attracted by the advances in science in the nineteenth century, became apprenticed to a pharmaceutical chemist. The young man with William Ransom and he was born and bred Hitchin; the pharmaceutical chemist was in Birmingham then thriving with busy factories. In 1846 William returned to Hitchin and set up his own business. He grew medicinal plants on the family farm: Henbane, Wild Lettuce and Belladonna. Other plants, he imported from as far away a Syria. He grew lavender but not in competition with Perks & Llewellen concentrating rather on its medicinal properties. William died in 1914 and the firm was continued by his son who also took over the growing of lavender for toiletries when Perks & Llewelyn closed down. Ransom Naturals became a public company in 1969 and now grows its plants near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. It has become renowned for its natural products.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Hitchin had its engineers. One, Ralph E. Sanders & Son, were carriage builders, cycle manufacturers and motor car engineers. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Harry Ricardo had praised Lanchester for producing a car that was not simply a motorised carriage. Sanders built motorised carriages in their workshop alongside carriages designed to be drawn by a horse. To me this goes a long way to explain the early car manufacturing process whereby the chassis and engine would be manufactured and a coach built body added to satisfy the particular requirements of the customer. As the motor car was made in increasing numbers and standardised forms, Sanders' business shrank although it continued as a garage until 1979.

John Whiting was a fellmonger, not unlike my own family who were fellmongers in Wheatley just to the south of Oxford and I wrote about this in my biography of my great great uncle William Smith Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Devotee. Alan Fleck and Helen Poole describe the business of fellmongers in their book Old Hitchin. It is about the hides of sheep and how they are cleaned and softened prior to tanning. They suggest that Hitchin hides may well have been used for parchment and I make that assumption for my family's business given their proximity to Oxford and its colleges. In the case of Hitchin it was fine hides used in book binding which began with the partnership of GW Russell and Henry Featherstone which took over the business from Whiting. In 1886 GW Russell & Son was formed and in 1949 it took over E&J Richardson of Newcastle and so secured the sole manufacturing rights for fine book-binding leather. The firm made the leather for the late Queen's Bible at her Coronation in 1953. The business, Russell Fine Leathers, continues in Hitchin and also in Suffolk.

Further reading:

Alan Fleck and Helen Poole, Old Hitchin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999)

High Wycombe manufacturing history

 Cloth was the industry of this Buckinghamshire village, like so many places in Britain. Being close to the river Wye, paper mills appeared; in common with other villages in the south of the midlands straw plaiting was an occupation for women, as was lace making. It was though furniture making that would enable High Wycombe to stamp its mark, although being the Operations Control Centre of Bomber Command in the Second World War was certainly higher profile for a number of decades.

First a word about paper making. The earliest records show paper making from rags pounded to pulp in the chalky water from the river Wye in the late sixteenth century. One of these early mills, Glory Mills at Woodburn Green, was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1894. Much later Wiggins Teape would have a research centre at nearby Beaconsfield. The mill finally closed in 1999. I write more about paper making in my blog on Hemel Hempstead, also on the Wye.

I am grateful to L.J. Mayes for his book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe for a fascinating description of the industry. Before referring to this, the Wycombe Chair Museum offers a list of furniture makers. It runs to some sixty-three pages and so offers a sense of just how widespread this activity was. Having said that, I suspect it was no more widespread than the plaiting of straw and making of hats in the dwellings of Luton or the spinners and weavers of the northwest.

Mayes offers a description of the chair making process of which I offer a precis, for my back hurts just to write it. We have to imagine an elm tree some forty feet tall. It has to be felled, stripped of its branches and bark. It then has to be sawn into planks two inches thick. This process is of course not unique to chair making; I refer to it also in relation to the naval shipyard in Portsmouth. Sawing was most often done in the wood where the tree was felled. A saw pit is dug some seven feet deep and in its stands the sawyer who will do most of the back breaking work. The prepared tree is moved over the saw pit and a second man first marks a straight line with string and chalk. He then stands on the tree holding the top end of the seven foot saw which he guides along the line whilst his mate sweats and is covered in saw dust. I was astonished to read in the context of shipbuilding that the sawyers of Portsmouth resisted the move to powered saw mills.

The plank is cut into sections to provide the seat for the chair. In order to make it into the seat of a comfortable Windsor chair, the seat has to be shaped. Next come the legs and and laths which are cut from green beech by 'bodgers' who also work within the wood from a simple shelter which they build themselves. The young tree trunks are roughly shaped and divided before being finely shaped by a simple pole lathe - a tool that has been used for centuries. All the parts including ash to be bent for the bannister are then assembled in the workshop using simple drills and chisels, everything done by experienced eye. The finished chair is stained by immersing it in liquid and then polished ready for sale. Mayes suggests that this manual process was still in use in the 1950s by a few chair-makers.

Industrialisation did impact Wycombe chair-making, but indirectly. The growing number of skilled men working in manufacturing around the country were being better housed and the houses needed well made furniture. Equally mechanisation reduced the workforce in paper making and farming releasing labour who found work in chair making. Increasingly the processes were broken down in a division of labour. Steam power came in the saw mills and massively increased output compared to saw pits. Bodgers continued to bring bundles of their work to the workshops. Relatively unskilled factory work came in with chair-seat caners, many of whom were women. The assembly of the chair, though, remained a skilled occupation for many years. In terms of selling, furniture vans would leave Wycombe on a tour of towns to sell their wares. In time retailers stepped in and catalogues were produced by the larger companies.

1851 saw Wycombe master chair-maker Edmund Hutchinson awarded the title of Champion Chair of the Exhibition. Already company names were emerging ahead of the pack: Gomme, Skull, Glenister, Dancer & Hearn.

Mechanisation increased with steam powered circular saws and borers. In 1874 the output of the town was estimated at one and half million chairs worth a quarter of a million pounds. The population had trebled over a quarter of a century, but without the utilities in place to cater for it; the river Wye was filled with waste. In time matters improved.

Wycombe had gained a reputation for cheap furniture. This stung and a number of companies embraced new styles. E.G. Punnett was engaged to design pieces influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement.

The coming of war in 1914 saw an immediate fall in demand for this higher end furniture and skilled workers were redeployed on short term public projects including wood panelling the Guildhall. Demand for lower end furniture was strong with orders for the many new barracks. War meant an end to competition from German and Austrian furniture makers and so in due course skilled men found themselves back in demand. Men volunteered or were called up and so manpower shortages became an issue. As elsewhere, the end of the war saw an upturn in demand but this was short-lived and unemployment loomed.

With the challenges of the interwar years many companies were reluctant to invest in mechanisation to reduce costs, an exception being E. Gomme & Sons which went from strength to strength. Mechanisation helped but more was needed.

Aircraft were built requiring woodworking skills. Dancer & Hearn in particular formed a relationship with de Havilland (the two owners were friends) and during slack periods parts were supplied for the Mosquito. Others followed with Gomme supplying fuselages and Baker's veneers.

Ercol was set up in Wycombe in 1920 by Lucian R. Ercolani and new designs began to appear.

The Second World War saw High Wycombe identified as a place where London based manufacturers could re-locate to escape bombing. Amongst these were Cossor which manufactured radar screens and cathode ray tubes. A number of medium sized furniture manufacturers took advantage of the opportunity to leave an industry that was becoming ever more challenging. Those that remained had the challenge of utility furniture of which I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw a change in the way furniture was marketed. Hitherto it had been the wholesalers and large retailers which had controlled what was produced. Parker-Knoll had begun their own consumer advertising and this was followed by Ercol and Gomme. Ercol chose the windsor style chair as their theme. Gomme preferred a series of furniture units which could be added to as required - G-Plan. I write of the further development of the British furniture industry in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The fifties saw consolidation among the furniture companies and the eighties and nineties closures and relocation. Glenisters closed; Gomme moved to Melksham, Parker-Knoll to Chipping Norton and Ercol to Princess Risborough.

At the beginning of this blog I referred to the Bomber Command Operations Centre. This has been written about extensively elsewhere. However the presence of the RAF and a major US Airforce base impacted on the town. Towards the end of the First World War the towns furniture makers who were busy supplying wooden components, set up The Aircraft Manufacturing Company. It came too late to contribute much, but its premises were re-purposed by woodworking tool maker, Broom and Wade, as the factory in which they manufactured pneumatic equipment amongst much else. They became the town's biggest employer and merged with Holman of Cambourne to become International Compressed Air (later Compair) in Slough. Other more recent aircraft related businesses are Springtech which manufactures precision springs, and Sabeti Wain which designs and manufactures aircraft interiors.

Further reading:

• James Rattue, High Wycombe Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002)
• L.J. Mayes, The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960)